


Whispers in the Dark

by AnonymousVow



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, Insanity, Vaguely AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-26
Updated: 2014-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-20 20:56:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1525391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonymousVow/pseuds/AnonymousVow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>America hears voices in his head. He wishes he didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whispers in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> An old de-anon from the kinkmeme, for the prompt: "An insane, isolationist Alfred". Vaguely AU and future-set, and written way back in 2009, so no knowledge of things like the NSA.
> 
> Originally named "Vox", and then I renamed after Skillet's song "Whispers in the Dark"

America heard voices. 

Voices only he could hear, voices of things that did not quite belong in the mortal world, and one might wonder why he pretended not to believe in England's fairies and unicorns, because he knew very well that the worlds outside the world existed. He did believe in them - but he wished he didn't, and he wished they didn't exist to be believed in, and when he was small someone -- someone, someone older and wiser and much more dead than he, someone who was Before England -- that dim-remembered figure had warded him against the Sight that showed him things he did not want to see. 

But that had not sufficed to stop him from hearing them. 

They spoke to him in blood-soaked noises, these dark-dwelling things that lived on the red spilled life of other things, and they damned him and praised him in hissing breaths (but they did not breathe air). 

They made him remember things he did not want to remember, the Old Nations he'd eradicated in his march to the uttermost West, the waters he'd fouled and the lands he'd razed, of the animals and peoples who had once been his friends and who were no longer, of those he'd destroyed and killed and consumed. 

But they loved him, and that was the most awful thing of all. 

***

"America," they crooned. "America, our America, mightiest on Earth America. Take it all, America. You could be an empire, America."

"No," he told them.

"No one can stand to you. They have all tried, and they all failed," And they whispered the names in a susurrus of contempt and gloating. "You could take their lands from them if you wanted, you with your ships and your soldiers, they couldn't stop you."

America yawned as deliberately and elaborately as a sated cat. "What do I want with their lands?" He threw his head back and opened his senses to himself, the tundras of Alaska and the plains of the Midwest, the sun-drenched West Coast and the bright-sky East Coast, the waters of the Pacific and the Atlantic and the Great Lakes, the fire-colored deserts and the snow-peaked mountains, and he laughed from the sheer joy of it. 

"What do I want with them, when _this_ is what I am?" 

*** 

"You could be greater than them all - you could eclipse any of the Old World, you could prove to _him_ that you deserve to be treated as an equal." 

"He does treat me as an equal," America protested, and could have said more. That he made demands that the rest of the world honored, that he was not only an equal but first among equals. And that other countries said that was too mild a statement to be the truth, that they were lapdogs and he the condescending master. 

But he didn't, and then he turned on every light in his house and set the television to blaring, some insipid show even he found an insult to his intelligence, but canned soundtracks and insincere smiles were preferable to the alternative.

The other nations did respect him, now, they _did_. Tomorrow he'd test them to make sure, though.

*** 

"Imperium," they sang to him, later, years later, after the world had turned, and the world had changed, and right now the world - his part, anyway - was cold and dim and filled with the silence of the deep night. He was trying to read - not one of his own things but an English translation of something that had French and German beginnings, a strident denunciation of him and his people, and he remembered Germany's eyes and France's sneer and England's scowl and knew this was no radical fringe-speaker but a voice of their peoples. 

"Imperium," they sang in the dark, and he shook his head and put the paper down.

***

"I won't, I won't, I won't," he chanted to himself, to them, to the air. He was curled up beneath a blanket, and he shook and trembled like a leaf's skeleton in an autumn wind, and the other countries would have concluded he had watched a scary movie again. He could only wish. All the scary movies in the world, even Japan's, with his talent for them, would have been preferable to the voices. 

"I revolted for this, I sacrificed EVERYTHING so that there would be something other than empires and their troubles for my people. I take in those who flee, who are exiled. I am America, I am the United States of America, I am not an empire!" he cried out in defiance, empty defiance, empty because there was no one to defy. 

He had sat up straight for that empty cry, but now he folded in on himself again, sagged like a puppet with cut strings, and curled up under the blanket again. "I won't, I won't," he repeated, simple as a child praying against the monsters under his bed. "I won't be an empire because empires - empires _fall_." 

*** 

The voices were stronger now, and they followed him even when he was on the lands of other Nations, which was a thing they had not done before. And they whispered in his ear, constantly, speaking over and under and through other Nations speaking to him. 

"America-san," Japan was hailing him, politely, "I remembered that you expressed interest in the next Final Fantasy game, so I took the liberty of procuring the new demo for you on this disc..." 

'Japan hates you, you who called down the fires of the sun down on his cities, you who humbled him and his emperors, you know that, America, do you not? He pretends he does not, he agrees with all you say because he is afraid of what you would do to him, he does not trust you or your mercy or your friendship. Two-faced Asian, two-faced traitor, he stabbed you in the back before, he would do it again in a heartbeat...' 

America smiled as widely as he could at Japan and thanked him in a loud voice, making heads turn and look, but he didn't care as long as he could drown out those other voices. 

And so he proceeded, taunting France so that he couldn't hear the voices counsel ways to break that French arrogance, yelling at Russia and China so he didn't hear the voices musing on what war with those two red rivals would be like, and laughing at England so that - England, more than any other country, the voices ripped to shreds, and England, more than other country, was the one America wanted not to have to think about in that way, the way the voices did. So he didn't look at England, and he talked over their voices so that his was the only one he heard, and he avoided meeting the other Nations and he tried not to think of him, of any of them, at all. 

*** 

 

"America!" It wasn't the voices, because there was only one of them, and it was accompanied by the pounding of a fist on America's doorway. "America, where have you been?! You've missed three UN meetings in a row! And that NATO conference! America, you need to..."

It wasn't the voices, but America ignored it anyway.

He was getting good at ignoring things.

*** 

They looked all over his lands for him, but they couldn't find him, and then he began to lock his doors, close his borders, and they couldn't get in easily, if at all. They sent him messages, they stood as close as they could get and screamed his name, raged, ranted, pled, called, begged. "America, please...." 

America hummed loudly along with the song now blaring in his ears, bobbing his head to the beat. The white cord of his earphones wound about his fingers as he danced to his private music and shut out the world around him.


End file.
